It is especially important in job accounting for manufacturing operations to keep an accurate tabulation of the amount of time an employee has spent at a workstation performing a particular job. Many systems have been proposed to do this task. Some of them, such as those proposed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,626,380 and 4,323,771 are essentially electronic time clocks, which translate the time of day onto some type of recording medium or to a computer in response to an employee-initiated operation, such as the insertion of an employee badge into the system. Other systems, such as that proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,333,085 are "stand alone" electromechanical systems which utilize computer data cards to record the time of day at which an employee begins and ends a certain task.
The basic element involved in prior art systems is that they record the time of day at which an employee "clocks in" and "clocks out" at a particular task or workstation. At least partially as a result of having to convert all the time of day information into the total amount of time the employee has been at the task, these systems are quite complicated.
There is a need for a simple system, both from a conceptual standpoint and from a hardware standpoint, to keep track of the time which a worker spends at a task. It would be especially helpful if a worker could maintain a device in his possession which could be easily transported from workstation to workstation to record the total amount of time he has spent at all his tasks over a period of days. Such a system would not only have application for manufacturing activities, but also in time recordation for various professions.
Accordingly, it is the principal object of the present invention to accurately determine the length of time a worker has spent at a workstation.
It is another object of the present invention to determine this amount of time in a manner not involving the successive recordation of the times of day.
Yet another object of the present invention is to determine that amount of time in a simple and inexpensive manner.
A further object of the present invention is to record on a device easily transportable by a worker the duration of time that worker has spent at all of the tasks he has performed over a series of days.